MICHAEL GEORGE

© Matthew L. Hunt Michael George was born in Wales and read English at University College, Oxford, but much of his career as a publisher and freelance photographer has been spent in New York. His first solo exhibition, Manhattan, took place there in 1981, and he went on to become a naturalised American citizen. Back in England, he has settled in Cooden, which is rather like David Hockney exchanging California for Bridlington. So it is appropriate that Michael York has provided the foreword to George’s latest book of photographs, Sussex by the Sea, for although resident in California ‘for the past almost 40 years’, he also has deep roots in Sussex – prep school in Hurstpierpoint, holidays with grandparents at Telscombe, honeymooning in Brighton and many visits to his parents in Lewes (they lived on St Martin’s Lane). It ought, perhaps, to be pointed out that Michael George has found so much to fascinate and inspire his artistic eye in his local surroundings, that all 166 photographs in Sussex by the Sea are taken in East Sussex. Broadly speaking, the narrative of the book follows the coast from Rye to Brighton with occasional forays inland to favourite spots such as the tea gardens at Litlington, Bateman’s and Herstmonceux Castle. Lewes is represented not only by a panoramic view of the town from the castle keep but also by more intimate details; two front doorways on Abinger Place, a study of Castlegate House (home to the poet and expert on bicameral legislatures, William Wyndham).

It is this combination that informs the whole book. In Bexhill, for example, stunning photographs of the De La Warr Pavilion are complemented by scenes from the annual Spring Fair at St George’s United Reform Church and a newspaper placard in Sackville Road (‘School Dinner Lady Killed by Wasp’). Michael George provides an incisive commentary that never distracts from the actual photographs; informative but not drily so. I was aware, for example, of the epitaph that Spike Milligan intended for his own gravestone, but I was unaware that the Celtic Cross tombstone in Winchelsea’s Parish Churchyard, which marks the last resting place of the ‘godfather of alternative comedy’, really does bear the legend ‘I told you I was ill’. The inscription is, however, in Gaelic, since the Diocese of Chichester refused permission for it to be in English.

The whole book abounds in delightful contrasts; sumptuously beautiful landscape studies and seascapes nestling alongside photographs of Brighton and Eastbourne beaches that confirm one’s gut instinct that the average English physique should seldom be allowed to be anything short of fully clothed. Double-page spreads allow for some witty juxtapositions. A polychrome ceramic roundel in high relief, one of several such roundels designed by Gilbert Bayes for Hastings’ White Rock Theatre, that depicts an ancient warrior, helmeted and breastplated, stripped for combat with sword purposefully outstretched, is matched by two youngsters on the beach in baseball caps, their spades deployed to similarly determined effect in the early stages of sandcastle construction. Sussex by the Sea is dedicated to the photographer’s mother, Mrs Megan George. A Bakewell tart that she baked, depicted on page 65, looks scrumptious!
Review by David Jarman - Viva Lewes - Issue 59 August 2011

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